Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,

I have not slept.

Conrad Aiken’s gravestone is a stone bench. With its inscription on the seat.

Incitatus.

The duel in which Pushkin was killed took place in 1837. The man who killed him, a French officer named Georges d’Anthes, lived another fifty-eight years.

Rupert Brooke was an anti-Semite.

R. B. Kitaj.

Protagonist went out at five?

Constance Mayer committed suicide by slashing her throat with Pierre Paul Prud’hon’s razor.

They are losing the Battle of the Ebro.

Psychic distance. Synesthetic equilibrium.

The Divine Comedy contains 14,230 lines.

Most of which Goethe described as repulsive.

Thucydides Mythistoricus.

Renoir’s father was a tailor.

There is no there there.

Why has Reader decided that Protagonist once worked as a logger? In prehistory. And near a town called Molalla, Oregon?

Tzeitl. Hodel. Chava.

A curator, showing Rodin certain of Blake’s drawings: He actually saw those things.

Rodin: He should have seen them three or four times.

Tennyson was reading Cymbeline when he died. His copy of the play was put into his coffin.

Was Freud sleeping with his wife’s sister?

Eulalia of Merida.

Hey, Djuna, are you still alive over there?

That great solemn ass Goethe, Claudel called him.

And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

Becky Sharp? Sonia Marmeladov? Daisy Buchanan?

Whistle, and she’ll come to you, wrote John Fletcher, of Beaumont and Fletcher, three hundred years before Lauren Bacall.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Two of Thomas Mann’s sons committed suicide.

As did two of Marx’s daughters.

T. E. Lawrence was illegitimate.

Louis Aragon won the Croix de Guerre in World War I and again in World War II.

Delacroix’s Journals. Berlioz’s Memoirs.

Thomas Gray was one of twelve children. All eleven others died as infants.

El Greco had to sue the Toledo Cathedral to be paid for his Disrobing of Christ. Which the Cathedral had commissioned.

Ljuba Welitsch was married to a traffic policeman.

Denis Diderot was an anti-Semite.

Hayim Bialik.

Lionel Johnson died after falling off a barstool.

Seymour Krim committed suicide.

Gepetto.

Or is it less the women than what the women represent? The years that have departed as well?

A life, that was?

Where there is no now now?

It was Dumas pere, not Dumas fits, who said that after God Shakespeare had created most. John Eglinton at the National Library in Ulysses is not sure.

Taine said he had read The Charterhouse of Parma fifty times.

The drawing of Michelangelo and the colors of Titian! Wrote Tintoretto on the wall of his studio.

A good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler.

Anaximander did or did not introduce the gnomon into Greece from Egypt.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.

Eliot, as an editor, rejected Animal Farm,

Another damned thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?

The Metropolitan Opera once threatened to write it into Rosa Ponselle’s contract that she could not ride her bicycle through the streets of Manhattan to rehearsals.

Naturally there is a statue of Ovid on the shore of the Black Sea in Constanta. Naturally gazing Romeward.

Treitschke was an anti-Semite.

Robert Burton may have committed suicide. Legend has him having predicted the date of his death through astrology. Then making certain it was correct.

Miroslav Holub.

The British army sustained sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

The Middle Parts of Fortune.

There is no mention of Achilles’ heel in Homer. In fact there is no mention of it by anyone until Statius, in Latin, nine hundred years later.

Protagonist’s threadbare jeans and faded workshirts. Some few more presentable remnants hanging, virtually never any longer worn.

Spent Adidas.

Alan Turing committed suicide.

Swyne and Dour.

Azucena.

What Horace defined as a kind of uncontrolled energy in Pindar.

Possibly explaining why he sometimes makes no sense whatsoever.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Can Protagonist even any longer afford to buy books?

Cézanne needed as many as five hundred sittings for a portrait. After a hundred and fifteen by Ambroise Vollard, he was willing to concede that the front of VoUard’s shirt was possibly acceptable.

He doesn’t come in here disguised like Westminster Abbey.

Gordon Bunshaft.

Gustave Courbet died at fifty-eight. Late along, he was drinking a full dozen bottles of wine a day.

Odi et amo.

Tell the people it is no use to depend on me any more now. Said Crazy Horse, bayoneted in the back at Fort Robinson.

Plaza El Toreo, Mexico, D.F., October 30, 1960. Carlos Arruza (rejoneador), Juan Silveti, Joselito Huerta, Manuel Capetillo, others, siete orejas y dos rabos. A benefit for Curro Ortega, who some weeks earlier had lost a leg when gored.

Protagonist will have watched that, also.

Louis Althusser spent four years in a psychiatric hospital after strangling his wife.